Finding a Voice

Women’s Center Director Susannah Bartlow Sparks Conversations with the Dickinson Community

by Lauren Davidson

January 2, 2010

Susannah Bartlow, director of the Women’s Center, hopes that the Landis House (background), the new home for the center and the Office of Diversity Initiatives, will become a safe, welcoming gathering place for all members of the Dickinson community.

Dickinson has supported a student-led Women’s Center for a few decades, but the college community needed more. More structure. More dialogue. More resources. In 2005, the President’s Commission for Women was revived, and one of its first initiatives was a campus climate survey, which reinforced the critical need for a Women’s Center director. Enter Susannah Bartlow.

“It was an incredibly rare opportunity to be in a position to start an [institutional] Women’s Center in 2008,” says the inaugural director. “The first women’s center was created in 1961, so we’re entering the third generation. That gives us the ability to look back at the history of women’s movements with new wisdom and knowledge.”

Bartlow began by engaging in conversations with groups and individuals campuswide and listening to their concerns. She wanted to gauge how students, faculty and administrators defined themselves and the community and what they perceived to be the challenges at Dickinson.

“We need to examine our unique history and what it means for the community,” she explains.

Bartlow is quick to note that many gender-identity related challenges are not specific to Dickinson. “We as a culture are really hard on people who don’t identify with gender norms,” says the daughter of a female pastor and a professor father who shared in the domestic duties. “Having an institutional Women’s Center is a blessing and a curse. It provides room for someone to facilitate that conflict resolution, but it also sparks and provokes discomfort.”

This year, Bartlow is working toward several goals. The first is to aid in the transition of the students who spearheaded the Women’s Center before her arrival.

“Those students were the reason there was any Women’s Center presence on campus at all,” she explains. “They have been key in mobilizing the students to actively speak out against sexual violence. The Feminist Collective [a new student-led organization] has done an outstanding job of continuing to push very hard for genuine dialogue about normative cultures on campus.”

It also was clear that Bartlow would have to address sexual violence on campus. “I could see that we needed an out and clear set of response protocols, structures in place like a rape-advocate program and a prevention and education program,” she says. “All of these things existed, but they weren’t organized in a transparent way.”

The Women’s Center collaborated with the Office of Diversity Initiatives (ODI) and the vice president for student development to bring a rape advocate to campus this fall. The center also founded the Assault and Sexuality Coalition and is working with regional partners to bring a violence-prevention coordinator to campus.

The other aspect of Bartlow’s job is that she teaches one course each semester in women’s & gender studies, which started as a women’s-studies certificate program in 1991, became a major in 2001 and modified its name in 2008 to reflect the field’s growing emphasis on gender as a social construct.

“I’ve been intent on finding my voice and defining my role,” says the holder of a Ph.D. in English from the University of Buffalo. “I’ve discovered that I can serve this community by being a bridge between different areas of the college.”

One such bridge is visible in the Women at Dickinson College: 1884-2009 celebration. The project originated with the Archives & Special Collections, but according to Bartlow, “We wanted to observe this important anniversary in a partnership with people across campus and to help them know the stories that exist and raise questions about the stories we don’t know. A group of faculty and administrators from across the college got together and brainstormed and came up with the series of events that are going on right now.” (Read more about the celebration on Pages 8 and 14.)

Another transition is in the works for the Women’s Center—a physical home in Landis House on the corner of College and Pomfret streets, which formerly housed economics. The Women’s Center will share the space with the ODI and the Conflict Resolution Resource Center (CRRC).

“I’m excited to see what being housed with the ODI and CCRC will mean for this campus,” Bartlow says. “It will be great to have this large and distinct space to share. Most Women’s Centers function as an open hangout—I want that, and the students have expressed a need for it.”

During the last year, Bartlow may have been the catalyst for some positive change, but she believes it has been a collaborative effort.

“These initiatives are a step toward establishing a greater sense of community and accountability so that people from across all spectrums of identities can see this as a place that is a little more welcoming,” she says. “Students say that they want to feel like they belong even outside of their particular group, whether it’s a club or organization or a social identity, and the Women’s Center wants to help get them there.”